WOMEN IN SURREALISM
the imagination in the wake of Surrealism
Corneli van den Berg
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements in respect of the Masters’ degree
qualification in the Department of Art History and Image Studies in the Faculty
of Humanities at the University of the Free State
Supervisor: Prof E.S. Human
Co‐supervisor: Prof A. du Preez

Date: October 2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS I

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS III

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCING THE IMAGINATION IN THE WAKE OF SURREALISM 1
1.1 DIEGO RIVERA’S LAS TENTACIONES DE SAN ANTONIO 5
1.1.1 Surrealist ‘poetic images’ 8
1.1.2 Shared imagining 10
1.1.3 Hypericonic dynamics 12
1.2 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 17
1.2.1 Image‐picture distinction 17
1.2.2 Archival approach 19
1.2.3 Chapter overview 20

CHAPTER 2: THE DANGEROUS POWER OF IMAGES – TORMENTING AND SEDUCTIVE IMAGERY IN THE
TEMPTATION OF ST ANTHONY 23
2.1 THE LEGEND OF ST ANTHONY: A TOPOS OF THE IMAGINATION 24
2.2 THE CHRISTIAN SAINT IN PATRISTIC LITERATURE 26
2.3 ST ANTHONY IN EARLY MODERN DEPICTIONS 27
2.4 THE SAINT AS MODERN ARTIST 32
2.5 FLAUBERTIAN ST ANTHONY AND HIS SEDUCTIONS 33
2.6 ST ANTHONY AS A SURREALIST TOPOS 36

CHAPTER 3: THE SURREALIST IMAGINATION 45
3.1 PRODUCTIVE IMAGINING 46
3.2 PERTINENT MOMENTS IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY OF THE IMAGINATION 48
3.3 VISIONARY IMAGINING 52
3.4 SURREALIST IMAGING ACTIONS: AUTOMATISM, CHANCE, DREAM & PLAY 54
3.5 ALCHEMY: A SURREALIST METAPHOR 61
3.6 APPROPRIATING SO‐CALLED PRIMITIVISM 64

CHAPTER 4: ON THE EDGE OF SURREALISM: A LATIN AMERICAN CLUSTER OF WOMEN ARTISTS 72
4.1 WOMEN AND SURREALISM 74
4.2 FRIDA KAHLO: AN UNWILLING SURREALIST 77
4.3 REMEDIOS VARO: COSMIC WONDER 82
4.4 LEONORA CARRINGTON: ALCHEMICAL SURREALISM 85

CHAPTER 5: IN THE WAKE OF SURREALISM: SURREALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA 92
5.1 ALEXIS PRELLER: DISCOVERING ARCHAIC AFRICA 95
5.2 CYRIL COETZEE: ALCHEMICAL HISTORY PAINTING 99
5.3 BREYTEN BREYTENBACH: A SURREALIST PAINTER‐POET 103

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 112

BIBLIOGRAPHY 118
APPENDIX A 132

SUMMARY
Summary
This thesis reports an exploration of various interrelated facets of human imaging and
imagining using the literary and artistic movement, French Surrealism, as catalyst. The ‘wake of Surrealism’ – a vigil held at the movement’s passing, as well as its aftereffects – indicates my primary focus on ideas concerning the imagination held by members of the Surrealist movement, which I trace further in selected artworks of a cluster of women surrealists active in Latin‐America as well as select artists in the South African context. 

The Surrealists desired a return to the sources of the poetic imagination, believing that the
so‐called ‘unfettered imagination’ of Surrealism has the capacity to create unknown worlds,
or the potential to envision often startling and strange realities. Not only did members of
Surrealism have a high regard for the imagination, they also emphasised particular
involuntary actions and unconscious functions of the imagination, as evidenced in their use
of the method of automatic writing, dreams, play, objective chance, alchemy and so‐called
primitivism.  

In this investigation I follow digital‐archival procedures rather than being in the physical
presence of the artworks selected for interpretation. Responding to this limitation and to
the current interest in image theory, I elaborate a method of art historical interrogation,
based on the eventful and affective power of images. This exploration of the imagination
into Surrealism’s wake therefore also functions as a ‘pilot study’, to determine the viability
of this approach to image hermeneutics. I appropriate and expand W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion
of ‘hypericons’ to develop the proposed concept of ‘hypericonic dynamics’. The hypericonic
dynamic transpires in ‘hypericonic events’, through the cooperative imaging and imagining
eventfulness of the interaction between artist and spectator, mediated by artworks. The
dynamic is especially prominent in artworks with a metapictorial tenor.  

With hypericonic dynamics and metapictorial thematics as my heuristic method, I
investigate artworks by three women surrealists – Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington – living and working in Latin‐America after the Second World War, and after the French Surrealist movement had already experienced its decline. Against the backdrop of indigenous visual culture their distinct individual styles are also related to Magical realism in the Latin‐American literary context, a style which overlaps and intersects with Surrealism. I expand upon insights gained in investigating the women in Mexico, to determine whether select South African artists, Alexis Preller, Cyril Coetzee, and Breyten Breytenbach belong in the wake of Surrealism.  

The central aim of my exploration of the imagination is to gain a deeper understanding of
the everyday human imagination and its myriad operations in daily life, for the greater part
conducted below the threshold of consciousness. The imagination is a universal human
function, shared by all, yet also operational at an individual level. It also performs a unique
function of image creation in the specialised domain of the fine arts. I understand the
imagination to be irreducible, while often working in a subconscious, involuntary, and
supportive, but nevertheless primary manner in everyday human life.  

Keywords:
Surrealism, imagination, image studies, Bildwissenschaft, metapictures, hypericons, ‘power

of images’, ‘hypericonic dynamics’, St Anthony, women surrealists.  


INTRODUCTION
In this thesis I aim to explore various interrelated facets of human imaging and imagining using the literary and artistic movement, French Surrealism, as a catalyst for this investigation. I propose Surrealism, with its emphasis on highly imaginative and challenging artistic creations, can be a valuable springboard for studying human imaging and imagining capabilities and activities, both artistic and non‐artistic.   For a period of approximately two decades, Surrealism was one of the dominant movements of the modernist avant‐garde in Europe.1 Although situated, diachronically, within the modernist avant‐garde, the Surrealist movement followed its own historical trajectory. In contrast to what one could term Greenbergian ‘mainstream modernism’, and its predominantly formalist rush toward aesthetic autonomy in the various forms of non‐ figurative expressionism, constructivism, and minimalism, and the search for aesthetic purity, Surrealism was interested in researching the roots of the imagination, in the subconscious and dreaming.2    The surrealist period style or time‐current took form and solidified into the French Surrealist movement with the publication of André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924.3 Various authors, including Theodor Adorno in his 1956 essay Looking back on Surrealism, remark on the fact that French Surrealism did not survive the Second World War. Reasons given for this termination include the fact that most of the group’s members no longer resided in Paris, having become exiles in America during the war, and since the changes in bourgeois society that they had called for, after the destruction of the Great War, no longer applied (Adorno 1992: 87).4   Therefore, the French movement can be described as having a reasonably well‐defined beginning and ending.

1 Cf. Poggioli (1968), Calinescu (1977), Bürger (1984).

2 Abstraction, grounded in the early twentieth century work of Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, was, according to Cheetham (1991: xi) the most daring and challenging development to occur in Western painting since the Renaissance. Abstraction, or the search for the aesthetic ideology of purity, had crucial consequences for all aspects relating to art – for art ‘itself’, its creation and embodiment, as a model for society, and – closely related – for art as a political force (Cheetham 1991: 104). 

3 When I am referring to the core French group the terms ‘Surrealism’ or ‘Surrealist’ will be spelled with a capital ‘S’. I indicate the broader ‘surrealist’ dynamic or time‐current, and the wake of ‘surrealism’, by using a lowercase ‘s’.   

4 Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School were also exiled in America, until eventually becoming disenchanted with the so‐called progressive free West, and returning to Germany. 2 still be alive and endure (Breton 2010: 35, 129).

5 Maurice Nadeau, Surrealism’s premier historian, allows that the movement might have failed in achieving the societal revolution it had called for, but denies that it is dead, believing the surrealist attitude or mind‐set to be “eternal” (Nadeau 1965: 35).